Christianity/Spirituality

Kierkegaard on Atheism …sort of

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

kierkegaard Soren Kierkegaard is hands down my favourite philosopher, not that I know that many philosophers. I’m a picker and chooser–a collector that doesn’t always understand what he collects, but is compelled to collect just the same–as I think I’ve mentioned someplace before. The reason I choose Soren is because he too is skinny and likes walking.

Witness:  “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.  Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness.  I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” SK

Kierkegaard perambulated himself into some truly insightful ideas. Yesterday, I stumbled upon one of his thoughts that explained why atheism doesn’t stand a chance in hell of becoming pervasively accepted. At least until someone even more brilliant than Stephen Hawkings forever takes the meta out metaphysics, and is able to communicate it to the unwashed lot of us.

Here’s Kierkegaard (anticipating Rene Girard’s mimetic desire theory):  Please forgive Soren’s gender biased language–it was 1850.

For from “the others,” naturally, one properly only learns to know what the others are–it is in this way the world would beguile a man from being himself. “The others,” in turn do not know at all what they themselves are, but only what the others are. There is only One who knows what He Himself is, that is God; and He knows also what every man in himself is, for it is precisely by being before God that every man is. The man who is not before God is not himself, for this a man can be only by being before Him who is in and for Himself. If one is oneself by being in Him who is in and for Himself, one can be in others or before others, but one cannot by being merely before others be oneself. (Christian Discourses)

The double bind of being human is that we seek to become ourselves by consciously and subconsciously imitating each other. But without a model beyond our collective selves we never find a self. And so, as Charles Bellinger (whose essay comparing Girard and Kierkegaard I’m completely indebted to here) points out, the only context in which we gain coherence, stability, and purpose is found in the transcendent relationship between us and God our Creator.

So wouldn’t it be the case that even if there were no God, our existential lack, that small niggling, sometimes overwhelming sense of incompleteness, would never allow us to be content with a closed, nobody-here-but-us-chickens universe?

Beauty/Spirituality

The (monastic) journey, Rilke, St. Peter’s Abbey

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

In the first whisper of morning light I watched a 20 foot cedar move its slow movement outside the sitting room window at St Peter’s Abbey. A picture of a child running through tall grass by the edge of town moved in my mind. Later in the day I would walk the silent monastery halls, arm in arm with Father James, his 82 year old frame a little more bent, his step slightly slower, and he would say with that smiling voice, that he’s had enough birthdays. For most of his live he’s been a monk in community, and a hermit–so he knows how to let go.

father james2 But how do I let him go? How do I let anything go? Or, is this the monastic journey?

The evening before, over tea and raisin cookies, we talked, as we always did, about God, mindfulness, failings, innocence, history, loss, promise, personality, church… I’m not a great conversationalist, but in the presence of Fr. James I always feel elevated and connected through the simple give and take of words.

We talked about poetry too. On the drive to St. Peter’s Deb and I had stopped in Saskatoon. We took an unplanned detour and came across a used book store. I bought a book of Rilke poems. I didn’t know about the Duino Elegies–Rilke’s last work. I showed Father James my book, he laughed and said he was reading the same book.

How do you sustain the picture? The picture of the innocent child running through tall grass and feeling as though she was entirely in God and God was entirely in her? How do you sustain a shot of heart-gladness that makes you feel as though death is behind you? That makes you feel a depth of forgiveness that precludes any sense you needed forgiving. Is this too the (monastic) journey? The letting go of the picture so that it can return again…the perpetual letting go, so as perhaps to enable it’s infinite return?

Christianity/Religion/Spirituality

Father Joe

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

I finally had the sense to pick up Father Joe. The book had been in my “to read” pile for more than a year. Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul is a memoir of sorts. It’s a story about a seemingly unlikely relationship between the author Tony Hendra and a religious.

The book begins with the fourteen-year-old Tony who finds himself entangled with a married Catholic woman. When the husband, a sincere-to-a-fault Catholic, discovers the tryst, he whisks the boy off to get straightened out by a priest. The priest he meets is a gentle, stammering, quirky, and wise Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrillow. The monk is nothing like what he imagined and a bond develops between them. 

fatherjoe So taken is Hendra with Father Joe that upon graduating from high school he is intent on joining the Benedictine community. However, Father Joe’s deeper wisdom is that he wait. Then in one of the more fascinating moments in the book, Hendra describes losing his faith, as if over night. The remainder of the book is a description of an alternately sinking and surfacing life. Hendra slides into substance abuse, goes through a ruined marriage, but the one anchor in his life is the non-judgemental Father Joe. It’s this relationship that, in the most practical sense, saves the author.

At every level it’s a wonderful story, but it might also be worth mentioning that hendraTony Hendra, while attending Cambridge, performed frequently with his friends and Monty Pythons-to-be, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. He was editor in chief of Spy magazine, and the original editor of National Lampoon. He also played Ian Faith in the movie, This Is Spinal Tap, and was the co-creator of Spitting Image. He has written frequently for New York, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, among other magazines.

—

The bad news: Just after I wrote this little review I learned that the “delinquency” of Hendra may have gone far deeper than the memoir divulged. When the book was published, Jesscia Henda, 39 at the time, “unable to bear the hypocrisy,” wrote that she had been sexually molested by her father when she was seven and that it happen two more times after that. The charges are denied by Hendra but the New York Times article, to my mind, seems credible. 

So what do you do with a non-fiction memoir you profoundly enjoyed only to find that the author may have committed one of the most grievous and damaging of crimes?

What saves the book is that while it’s ostensibly about Tony Hendra, it is more properly about Father Joe, the joyful, generous, wise monk, who had the kind of presence that could save one from religious cynicism. In fact at the end of the book we learn of the immense impact this humble Benedictine monk had on hundreds of people, including Rowan Williams, currently the archbishop of Canterbury, and Princess Diana.